Design of a Very Low Energy Beamline for NA61/SHINE

A new, low-energy branch is being designed for the H₂ beamline at the CERN North Experimental Area. This new low-energy branch would extend the capabilities of the current infrastructure enabling the study of particles in the low, 1 - 13 GeV/c, momentum range. The first experiment to profit from this new line will be NA61/SHINE (SPS Heavy Ion and Neutrino Experiment), a multi-purpose experiment studying hadron production in hadron-proton, hadron-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions at the SPS. However, other future fixed target experiments or test-beam experiments installed in the downstream zones could also benefit from the low-energy particles provided. The proposed layout and expected performance of this line, along with estimates of particle rates, and considerations on the technical implementation of the beamline are presented in this contribution. A description on the instrumentation, which will enable particle-by-particle tagging, crucial for the experiments scope, is also discussed.